Bubonic Plague Scare: Ruining Researching?

Drug Design Specialist Dr. Ted Reid says working with bio-terrorism agents is like working a risk these days. "Who wants the trouble, who wants the trouble? So why bother? Your life would be disrupted. You can have yourself hauled off in front of the tv in chains. Who wants to run that kind of risk because something goes wrong?"

One of his collegues heard about the news at Harvard Medical School and wrote..."I fear this will serve as a major discouragemnt to the scientific community especially to scientists who wish to work on bio-terrorist agents..."

Reid says, "Research is changing. In fact, for me soon I'm going to retire because when I started off we didn't have all these problems. We could sit back and do things carry out research. Now, it's become a nightmare." Dr. Reid says the Center for Disease control is demanding reasearch centers across the world to keep better tabs on most biological agents. He says that means more paper work, more bookkeeping and more chances to make mistakes.

Dr. Reid ads that other collegues at the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center have a high regard for Dr. Butler as a researcher. Butler has been a researcher at TTU since 1987.